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Senatorial Follies

Saturday, January 2, 2021

The New York Times and others have reported that ten Senators have joined Hawley in pledging to vote to steal the election for Trump. The eleven are a mix of Senators with presidential ambitions and newly elected freshmen Senators.

Let’s put the freshmen aside for the moment,and concentrate on the presidential aspirants. The question that arises is: Why are they doing this and will it work for them?

Each of them are perfectly aware of the following:

  1. They will not prevail in the Senate.
  2. Joe Biden was lawfully elected president and there is not a smidgen of evidence to the contrary.

So, first question: Why are they doing this?

They have each placed a bet that the presidential nominating contest in 2024 will be decided by the most brain dead of the base, the Trump dead-enders. They want to get the support of that base for 2024. This part is obvious. We can certainly exclude that they are doing this for any sort of principled reason, because see item 2 above.

Second question: Will it work?

This is the harder one to answer. When Hawley appeared to be acting alone, one could make the argument that he was positioning himself to get a lock on the brain dead vote, but now that his potential rivals have gotten in on the act, it is unclear that any will benefit vis a vis the others to any great extent. Perhaps that was Cruz’s thinking when he recruited the others. After all better to split the field at the start than to leave it to one guy.

But it seems to me that everyone of them is assuming something not in evidence: That Trump himself will not be a factor in 2024, either as a candidate himself or, as we see him today, someone intent on wreaking vengeance on Republicans who he believes have betrayed him by not stealing the election for him. Mind you, in his book, it’s not sufficient that they try to steal the election, it is only sufficient if they succeed. It would not surprise me at all if Trump spent 2024 tweeting out denigrating comments about folks like Cruz. After all, it’s not like he hasn’t done so in the past. And remember what Robert Vaughan’s villain in Superman III had to say: “It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail”. Trump, not having been successful, may very well want to be sure that everyone else fails.

It is at least marginally possible that there will be a sufficient number of whackjob candidates in 2024 such that they split up the whackjob vote so much that a lesser whackjob, like the supremely hypocritical Ben Sasse, would sneak through to the nomination. He would then also have to face a barrage of tweets from the Donald which would dampen Republican turnout for Sasse, who is the type of candidate the “Never-Trumpers” would hail as the Messiah returning the Republican Party to its pre-2016 roots. You know, the fantasy party that didn’t cater to racists, religous bigots, and brainwashed Foxaholics while serving the interests of billionaires. For what it’s worth, my opinion is that the Republican Establishment will not be able to get the monster it has created back under control. Trump was not an anomaly, he is the Republican Party, but it remains to be seen whether any of the Senators lusting after his followers have what it takes to dish up the red meat they crave.

Speaking of the vote on the 6th, here’s a question. My wife did a bit of research and confirmed that the new Senate is sworn in tomorrow. That means that the terms to which Perdue and Loeffler were elected or appointed will have expired on that date. The results of the runoff on the fifth will not be known by the time the House and Senate meet to count the electoral ballots. How, then, do they get to cast a vote? Do they cast a vote?

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Too early to look ahead

Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Normally, at this time of the year, I write a post with my predictions for the coming year. Here’s last year’s, which holds up reasonably well, considering I had no reason to predict a pandemic when I wrote it. I did have reason, given her age, to suspect that Ruth Bader Ginsburg might not make it another year, but not much I can do about that.

This year, the fact is that we have to wait until January 5th to make an educated guess about what the future holds in store. If the Democrats manage to win both Senate seats in Georgia, we will have one future, one in which we might possibly save the Republican for our children and grandchildren. Should they lose, well, that’s a different story, with a far different future. In that event, the chances of the Republic surviving are somewhat slim. I’ll expand on one of these alternatives once we know whether Mitch McConnell will retain the ability to continue to destroy the country.

One thing we can say with certainty, as Paul Krugman has been repeatedly predicting. Deficits will suddenly starts to matter again, both to the Republicans who have ignored them for the past four years, and the media which has also followed the time honored practice of ignoring deficits when Republicans control the government. The one thing we can hope, if the Dems manage to win the Senate, is that they will have finally learned to tell the Republicans to shove it up their asses about the deficit.

So, more to come after the fifth, unless I forget, which is entirely possibly, as I am getting to be a very old man.

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Both siding it at the Times

Sunday, December 27, 2020

The New York Times tells us that early doubters are now showing a willingness to take the vaccine. That’s nice. But check out their roll of early doubters:

The time frame was dangerously accelerated, many people warned. The vaccine was a scam from Big Pharma, others said. A political ploy by the Trump administration, many Democrats charged. The internet pulsed with apocalyptic predictions from longtime vaccine opponents, who decried the new shot as the epitome of every concern they’d ever put forth.

Funny, I couldn’t place any of those “many Democrats”, so I went to DuckDuckGo (Google is evil) and did a search for “Democrats charge that vaccine is a political ploy” and got no relevant results. It’s true that many Democrats criticized “Operation Warp Speed” inasmuch as it was a typical Trumpian exercise in spreading money to favorites, but I can’t recall any nationally prominent Democrat claiming that any of the vaccines announced by reputable drug manufacturers were a Trumpian political ploy or that the very idea of a vaccine was such a ploy. Also, I seem to recall that polls have consistently shown that rank and file Democrats were more likely to say they would take a vaccine once one was approved.

If this statement was not made up out of whole cloth, it was made from cloth that had only the tiniest piece cut out. But that’s the Times these days, constantly showing us how unbiased it is by pushing a false both sides narrative that, in fact, is biased against Democrats.

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Sad, but likely true

Wednesday, December 23, 2020

I fear that Driftglass has once again hit the nail on the head.

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A modest proposal, crushed!

Tuesday, December 22, 2020

I’m actually somewhat surprised at this. Even farther right “news” site Newsmax has joined Fox in walking back claims against Smartmatic and Dominion, both of which manufacture voting machines about which the whackjobs have spun no end of conspiracy theories.

When these “news” sites are forced to air there retractions it drives the whackjobs wild, since, among other things, it contradicts the stuff clogging their Facebook feeds.

I touched on libel law in another context in a recent post, but now’s a good time to suggest that it might make a lot of sense for other victims of these propaganda outlets to follow the lead of Smartmatic and Dominion.

Smartmatic and Dominion had a bit of an advantage over some potential plaintiffs, because they are arguably not “public figures” and would not have to prove “actual malice” to prevail in a libel action. But lets take a look at the definition of actual malice:

Actual malice is a statement made with a reckless disregard for truth. Actual malice can be established through circumstantial evidence. High degree of awareness of falsity is required to constitute actual malice. If the plaintiff is a public figure, the plaintiff should prove by convincing evidence that the defendant published a defamatory statement with actual malice, i.e. with “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” If the plaintiff is unable to prove actual malice, then the plaintiff cannot recover. Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, 501 U.S. 496 (U.S. 1991)

Back in the day, before the advent of Fox and the internet, it would ordinarily have been next to impossible to prove actual malice in a libel action against a mainstream news outlet, especially if the plaintiff was a public figure. A news story might contain a falsehood about that public figure, but the odds were high that it was the result of something that at least came close to an honest mistake.

Times have changed. The Dominion and Smartmatic situations are just isolated examples of the type of misinformation that Fox and its even slimier ilk embrace with the full knowledge that they lack a shred of evidence for their assertions. So far as I know, they don’t even dress it up by reporting that “some say (enter libelous statement here), they simply assert lies as fact.

The victims of this sort of thing should follow the Dominion/Smartmatic example. Fox and its ilk would face a dilemma. They would have to either 1) continue to run retractions, thus outraging their easily deluded base, or 2) defend the lawsuits with increasingly slim odds of winning. I have never handled one of these cases, but I would hazard a guess that one could buttress one’s case by showing that the defendant publishes material with “reckless disregard of whether it was false or not” on a regular basis.

It is unclear if the Supreme Court would come to the rescue. After all, if they rule that right wing outlets have an unfettered right to lie without consequences (something the sainted Founding Fathers never intended, but something that Fox has claimed in the past), they would have to extend the same rights to the left, or they’d have to do some really fancy legal gymnastics to make it a right wing only right.

Sigh! After writing all this, I came upon this, which shows that the courts are ready, willing and able to turn those somersaults:

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit against Fox News after lawyers for the network argued that no “reasonable viewer” takes the primetime host Tucker Carlson seriously, a new court filing said.

The case was brought by the former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who said Carlson defamed her on his show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” by saying she extorted President Donald Trump “out of approximately $150,000 in exchange for her silence about an alleged affair,” the filing said.

Fox News asked the judge to toss out McDougal’s case by arguing that “Carlson’s statements were not statements of fact and that she failed adequately to allege actual malice.”

McDougal said two of Carlson’s statements during the episode on December 10, 2018, were defamatory:

Carlson’s claim that McDougal “approached Donald Trump and threatened to ruin his career and humiliate his family if he doesn’t give them money.”

Carlson’s claim that McDougal’s actions amounted to “a classic case of extortion.” But Fox News argued that Carlson “cannot be understood to have been stating facts, but instead that he was delivering an opinion using hyperbole for effect,” the ruling said.

It added that Fox News “submits that the use of that word or an accusation of extortion, absent more, is simply ‘loose, figurative, or hyperbolic language’ that does not give rise to a defamation claim.”

US District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil agreed with Fox’s premise, adding that the network “persuasively argues” that “given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes.”

“This ‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that he is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary,’” the ruling said.

Wow. Well, I refuse, at least partly, to agree that this totally undercuts my premise, though it does seem that at least one judge feels the right has a license to lie that it is unlikely would be extended to a lefty. After all, the “general tenor” of Rachel’s show is such that it would not inform the viewer that it is total bullshit. And wherever did the judge get the idea that Carlson has “reasonable viewer[s]”? One would think that the court would at least require a disclaimer from Tucker to the extent that his viewers should remember that they should not take anything he says seriously.

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Some Good News

Monday, December 21, 2020

It is an odd thing that while some truly horrible things are going on in plain sight, though for reasons unknown our media tends to ignore or downplay the worst of them, like the President of the United States contemplating stealing an election by declaring martial law,other things are happening that should give us at least some measure of hope. This being the Christmas season, I shall cast off my usual fairly pessimistic take on things, and accentuate the positive.

One hopeful sign is the fact that we are, to a great extent, confronting our history, and acknowledging the sins of our past.

When I was a kid, I remember wondering why it was that we were naming submarines after Confederate generals, but for the most part, like everyone else, I accepted the normalization of treason committed in order to keep people enslaved. The events of the past few years, despite the efforts of stable geniuses to prevent it, have forced us to rethink who are the heroes and who are the villains.

Even 10 years ago I would never had bet on this happening:

The Commission on Historical Statues in the United States Capitol has recommended that civil rights icon Barbara Rose Johns represent Virginia in the National Statuary Hall Collection, replacing the existing statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

Gov. Ralph Northam has also announced that his proposed budget includes dearly $500,000 to replace the statue.

“On April 23, 1951, sixteen-year-old Barbara Rose Johns led a student walkout at Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, protesting the overcrowded and inferior conditions of the all-Black school compared to those of White students at nearby Farmville High School,” a release said.

Her actions got the support of NAACP lawyers Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill, who took up her case and filed a lawsuit that would later be one fo five cases the United States Supreme Court reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka when it declared segregation unconstitutional.

via Crooks and Liars

I confess, I never heard of Ms. Johns before, which speaks volumes about the way we have perverted our history. She deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Rosa Parks.

Speaking of our historical memory, one other bright spot is the fact that there’s a lot of history being written these days taking another look at the contributions of black people in ending their own enslavement. Other than Frederick Douglass, back in the day you’d never know there were black people in the abolitionist movement.

Speaking of which, this is a good place to plug the upcoming book of a scholar from Princeton who shares my last name, but is a better writer.

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Worth thinking about

Sunday, December 20, 2020

Here’s an interesting op-ed piece in the Boston Globe, by a fellow named Josh Bernoff. The premise is that in this social media age, most people are exposed to what they want to hear, largely due to algorithms that feed “both sides” the facts and opinions they are predisposed to believe. This, in turn, has deepened our divisions and led to our highly divided polity, with the brain dead on one side and the rational folks on the other. (Bernoff doesn’t quite describe the divide that way, but we know the truth)

Bernoff, presents his proposal as a way of at least partially reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, the destruction of which by the Reagan Administration is responsible for right wing talk radio and Fox News, among other horrible things.

Let me step back and say that if you tried to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine today, even solely on broadcast media, the current Supreme Court would declare it unconstitutional. Bernoff’s proposal might just pass muster with this court, though I wouldn’t bet my life savings on it.

He basically proposes a trade off. Facebook, Twitter and their ilk get to keep their Section 230 protections, which basically prevent them from being sued for the content they publish, so long as they agree to something in return:

Last year, Facebook generated $70 billion in advertising revenue; YouTube, around $15 billion; and Twitter, $3 billion. Now the FCC should require them to set aside 10 percent of their total ad space to expose people to diverse sources of content. They would be required to show free ads for mainstream liberal news sources to conservatives, and ads for mainstream conservative news sites to liberals. (They already know who’s liberal and who’s conservative — how do you think they bias the news feed in the first place?) The result would be sort of a tax, paid in advertising, to compensate for the billions these companies make under the government’s generous Section 230 liability shield and counteract the toxicity of their algorithms.

Why do this with ads, rather than inserting posts directly into the social media news feed? Dropping an unexpected post into a news feed — not from a friend and not labeled an advertisement — would feel like an unwelcome intrusion to many users. Besides, media companies already know that ads work: A healthy chunk of the social media titans’ ad revenue already comes from ads that generate clicks into media sites.

These ads would also create a dynamic that would strengthen engagement across the political spectrum. MSNBC, offered free ad units targeted to conservatives, would not provide its new audience with the same old liberal content, because no conservative would ever click on that. Instead, it would have to figure out how to create and advertise content attractive and interesting to those outside its natural audience. Fox News would grapple with the same conundrum from the opposite side of the political spectrum. While I wouldn’t expect such content to appear in those networks’ marquee broadcasts, there could certainly be a place for it in a section of their websites. For example, a media site might post links to articles like “The three priorities liberals and conservatives agree on’’ and “A startling way to move beyond the health care impasse.’’ We’d see more media on shared values, rather than the red-meat issues that divide us.

It might work.

To step back a bit. Section 230 provides protections to the evil Zuckerberg et.al., that mainstream media (even Fox, witness its rush to fact check Lou Dobbs when voting machine manufacturer Smartmatic threatened to sue) does not have. Not only can a newspaper publisher be sued for libel if it libels someone, it can be sued for libel if it passes along someone else’s libel, in the form of an ad, for instance. That was the basis for the suit in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the landmark case in which the rational Supreme Court of long ago ruled that a public figure had to prove actual malice to prevail in a libel action. The plaintiff in that case took issue with an ad that the Times printed, not content the Times itself had written. The court did not question that the Times could be liable for the contents of an ad that it simply printed. It simply ruled that there is a higher standard when a public figure is doing the suing.

At the current time, due to Section 230, if I clearly libel someone on Facebook, I can be sued, but, unlike the New York Times, Facebook cannot. It saves them a lot of money in two ways: besides not paying libel judgments, they can basically spend little or no time moderating content.

So, unless the present Supreme Court were to impose the equivalent of Section 230 as a matter of constitutional law (and that’s entirely possible) it would have to step aside and let this trade off become law.

It would be far better if we could 1) get rid of Section 230 altogether, or substantially modify it, and 2) reimpose the Fairness Doctrine, but as I said earlier, it’s almost a certainty that the current court would, at the behest of Fox among others, rule the Fairness Doctrine unconstitutional.So, Bernoff’s suggestion might be worth a try. One caveat: how do you define “mainstream” news sources in a way that passes constitutional muster? If Fox gets to advertise to me for free, why shouldn’t OAN or Newsmax?

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Yet another post about weak Democrats

Friday, December 18, 2020

A day or so ago Little Marco tweeted out how outraged he was that Biden aide Jen O’Malley Dillon called Republicans “fuckers” in an interview in Glamour magazine.

Before I go on, let me be clear that the source of his outrage was not the fact that some Republicans are not fuckers at all, such as Mike Pence and the genius (at least if Melania has anything to say about it). No, this was yet another example of a Republican consumed by faux outrage over something that pales in comparison to the sort of thing that Republicans do all the time.

Now, this is the part of the post where I would ordinarily start ranting about the fact that Democrats will remain in their defensive crouch, and utter not a word about the totally hypocrisy of a Trump loving Republican complaining about such insults. But let me defer that for a moment, because there is actually, or at least possibly, a possibility that there’s something happening here from another part of the political eco-system. So I’ll defer the rant about Democrats for a while.

Rubio tweeted out his outrage, so it goes without saying that he got a lot of responsive tweets pointing out his hypocrisy in various ways, but what’s even more encouraging is that some media types are beginning to call out the Republican hypocrisy. Some examples here and here. It is at least possible that after 4 years of being browbeaten by Republicans, many in the media have decided that they might as well tell it like it is, rather than play the both sidism game. We’ll have to see if that continues, but the pushback to Marco is at least somewhat encouraging.

Now, on to the rant. It has been reported that some in Biden’s inner circle are very concerned about Dillon’s comments. That is unfortunately typical of establishment Democrats. Whether they are actually concerned or not, they felt it incumbent upon themselves to leak that they were concerned. Yet another example of the failure on the part of a substantial number of Democrats to learn the lessons of the past 40 years. The proper response, of course, is to laugh at Rubio and his ilk, while noting that they’re the ones that are always calling Democrats snowflakes. The Democrats who get it are still far and few between, AOC and her compatriots being the rare exceptions. This country may never recover from the fact that Obama failed to stomp on the Republicans when he truly had them down at the start of his first term, instead handing Republican “moderates” veto power over the stimulus plan and the health care bill, both of which emerged weaker and more compromised that if he had just done what needed doing and had it rammed through Congress the way McConnell has rammed through everything he has wanted. If,as the Axios article to which I’ve linked states, Biden’s advisers really think they’ll be able to work with Republicans they are living in a fool’s paradise. The Republicans are already hard at work trying to destroy the economy, after which they will make it impossible for Biden to fix it, assuming 1) the Republicans maintain control of the Senate, or 2) Democrats take the Senate but allow Republicans to filibuster. The Democrats inability to respond to Little Marco’s outrage with derision is merely emblematic of their larger problem of somehow believing that the relationship between the parties is what it was in the 1960’s.

End of rant.

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Home Grown Grifter avoids the spotlight

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

A few days ago I mentioned to my wife that Linda McMahon, who failed to buy a Senate seat here in Connecticut despite two tries-much to the credit of Connecticut voters- had managed to avoid being openly corrupt in her administration of the Small Business Administration. But that doesn’t mean that the agency hasn’t been corrupt, only that she’s managed to keep her head down somewhat. Well, she can raise her head up high now, because if she’s not the most corrupt person in the administration, she is at least in the running, since there’s no way she wasn’t involved in the following.

The SBA administers the Paycheck Protection Program, which Congress passed last year, and, of course, it was fertile ground for corruption, given the inability of Congress to effectively oversee it, and the need to quickly implement it. Priority number one for the Trump administration has always been rewarding its supporters to the detriment of the rest of the country, including those who are supposed to benefit from a given program, and McMahon’s administration of the PPP has been, to say the least, questionable, and is also infected with unconstitutional support of “religious” organizations. Nowadays, many religious organizations are actually just massive grifts, but they dress up as religions.

“The federal government can’t take our money and give it to Joel Osteen or Robert Jeffress or Paula White—even in the wake of a pandemic,” I wrote back in May. But that’s exactly what Trump’s Small Business Administration has done by giving Paycheck Protection Program funds to churches. Paula White’s church took in between $150,000 and $350,000, Jeffress’s church grabbed between $2 million and $5 million and, now we know that Osteen’s megachurch pocketed $4.4 million. Other megachurches snagged millions of taxpayer dollars. As time passes, the inevitable abuses are coming to light. One megachurch televangelist even bought a private jet two weeks after receiving $4 million in PPP funds.

…

The CARES Act extended eligibility for loans from the Small Business Administration to nonprofits, something new. But the law did not give the SBA the power to extend this eligibility to churches, nor could it—the Constitution prohibits government funding of religion. In fact, the CARES Act only mentions religion once, to prevent universities from using taxpayer funds for “capital outlays associated with facilities related to athletics, sectarian instruction, or religious worship.” However, the SBA ignored that language along with the centuries-old bar on taxpayer-funded religious worship, and instead issued rules and guidance declaring that the forgivable loans distributed under the CARES Act’s Paycheck Protection Program “can be used to pay the salaries of ministers and other staff engaged in the religious mission of institutions.” To do this, SBA had to suspend numerous rules that, correctly, prevented taxpayer funds from flowing to churches.

Read the entire linked article. It’s an outrage that religions got a dime, but it’s even more outrageous that they are effectively exempted from having to prove they used the funds as required by law, and there is a stench emanating from at least one big time grifter:

Lisa Guerrero of Inside Edition has been digging too, and she discovered a private jet likely financed with PPP money. Marcus Lamb runs Daystar Television, which may have as many as 2 billion viewers and is valued at a quarter of a billion dollars. Two weeks after it took $4 million in taxpayer PPP funds, it bought a private jet, a Gulfstream V, valued at between $9 million and $10 million.

Lamb denied using taxpayer funds to get the private jet two weeks after it got the loan: “We had our own money.” If so, why didn’t it use that money for their employees? But you know why. Like any kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar, they denied it and then paid the money back. But only because Guerrero caught them.

I believe the reference to 2 “billion” viewers is probably a typo, but the rest has been reported elsewhere.

Give McMahon credit, though she’s ultimately responsible for allowing these abuses, her name never seems to surface.

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The court has spoken

Saturday, December 12, 2020

To no one’s great surprise,the Supreme Court has rejected the ridiculous suit in which some 17 Republican Attorney Generals, 120 plus Republican Congressmembers, and two fictitious states sought to cast aside the votes of millions of Americans. Contradictions were rife, including the fact that they sought a ruling that voting procedures should be declared unconstitutional only in those states Trump lost, while the same procedures in states he won were just fine, not to mention that many of the Congressmembers in question were arguing, sub silentio, that their own elections were illegal.

The court lost no time in throwing the case out, with only Thomas and Alito arguing on jurisdictional grounds they should have heard the case before throwing it out.

Why did the most partisan Supreme Court in history make such short work of this legal bullshit, many might ask.

Here’s my take.

None of the actors here have any particular love for the very stable genius. He was, however, a useful tool for them to get a lot of what they’ve been wanting to achieve over the course of the last 50 years or so, but he’s also been inconvenient in a lot of ways, so they’re not that sorry to see the back of him. But they have differing political problems.

One might think that at least the judges that the genius appointed would feel some sense of obligation to him, but step back a bit. He never cared who he put on the court, just like he never really ever cared about any policies that did not directly affect him. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett don’t owe their appointments to him, nor do the other judges he “named” to the lower courts owe him anything. They owe their appointments to the Federalist Society, and they will, until they leave the court in their coffins, rule consistent with the interests of the folks who run and fund that organization. They are perfectly willing to dismember our democracy, but as the wicked witch said about killing Dorothy, it must be done “slowly” and imperceptibly to the average American. A coup simply won’t do. They have lifetime appointments, so they don’t need to get re-elected.

The Attorneys General and the Congressmembers, on the other hand, have to deal with a monster their party has created: those who vote for them, who have become thoroughgoing fascists and who see the genius as their Supreme Leader. As the very stupid Ron Johnson pointed out in a moment of excessive candor, the Republicans need their votes. It is no longer the case that they can simply reap those votes and then deliver for the rich, they must also throw heaping helpings of red meat. They all, except perhaps the leader of the fictitious states, knew this was going nowhere, but it’s a way to keep the base red hot and in their corner, so they’ll do it.

This may be the last time that we avoid the complete destruction of the republic at the hands of the right. Things have now gotten to the point where they can’t whip up the base and then expect them to vote for a Mitt Romney. The base will insist that they renominate Trump or a similar whackjob. That means they will have an ever more difficult time garnering a majority of popular votes, or even electoral votes, so they will have to resort to the equivalent of gerrymandering the presidential election. There are a number of ways to do this. They could simply pass a law in already gerrymandered legislatures doing away with the popular vote in their state. This is perfectly constitutional. They could, alternatively, assign electoral votes like Maine and Nebraska do, by gerrymandered congressional districts, so that, in Pennsylvania, for instance, a 100,000 vote popular margin for the Democrat would translate into a majority of Republican electors. This is something that Pennsylvania Republicans were considering doing a few years ago. They didn’t, but if they can get a Republican governor, they may reconsider. And, of course, there’s always more sophisticated voter suppression, which the Supreme Court will facilitate. The coup, when it happens, will be far more subtle than what the genius is asking the court to grant him now.

It’s extremely hard to see how we can claw back our democracy, given the constitutional system under which we live. A small minority can frustrate any attempt to amend the constitution to correct its ever more obvious flaws. The Senate is ruled by states well stocked with whackos, which states contain a small percentage of the actual people in this country. The Republican Party has proven adept at manipulating these people and even though they have, to a certain extent, evaded the party’s complete control, they have still enabled the Republican Party to achieve most of its policy goals. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, shows no interest in sticking up for its base, or for delivering real benefits to those upon whom it relies for its votes. As the Republican Party moves ever farther to the right, the Democrats constantly adjust to the new “center” and please no one. When people like AOC come along, people who could actually energize the Democratic base and are capable of giving as good as they get, the Democrats instinctively try to marginalize them. The Democrats have been in a defensive crouch since 1972, and you can’t score decisive victories that way.

We are headed toward a state in which the forms of democracy will be maintained, at least for a while. There will be elected non-Republicans, but they will remain powerless and we will in actuality be a one party state. I hope I’m wrong, but the events of the last few weeks, though they won’t keep Trump in office, have demonstrated where we’re heading.

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